Balfour Beatty benefits from prefab panels on Virginia apartment project

Dive Quick:

• LCOR Inc. has awarded Balfour Beatty a $79 million agreement to build Sage at Countrywide Landing in Arlington, Virginia. Construction has commenced on the luxury multifamily community anticipated to spark extra improvement and vibrancy in the Crystal Metropolis district just outside the house of Washington, D.C.
• The Balfour Beatty staff is employing the most current systems and lean building methodologies in constructing the apartment building. These will include the prefabrication of exterior wall panels and mechanical, electrical and plumbing elements, as very well as the use of BIM, to guarantee efficient shipping and delivery of the undertaking.
• The utilization of prefabrication should save the Balfour Beatty groups installation time. It will also provide a safer installation approach, lower jobsite squander and free up added house for other trades on the flooring within the building, in accordance to the corporation.

Dive Perception:

The selection to use prefabricated exterior wall panels and MEP elements in developing the 19-tale making was centered on many factors, reported Sean Graham, vice president of functions in the Mid-Atlantic for Balfour Beatty.

“At their main, lean procedures, like prefabrication, are rooted in maximizing people’s functioning environments, ordeals, effectiveness, protection and time financial savings,” Graham told Development Dive. 

For instance, prefabrication of the exterior wall panels minimizes the amount of money of time that crews devote on performing from swing stages and/or lifts to set up the exterior sheathing and air barrier components. 

“Rather, the exterior sheathing and air barrier components arrive pre-mounted on just about every panel from the manufacturing unit,” he claimed. “The prefabrication tactic not only saves our task teams time all through installation, but it also eliminates squander from the jobsite, presents a safer strategy to set up and will save space on the floors for bordering trades.”

Introducing continue to greater time financial savings and effectiveness is the actuality the panels will not have to vacation much to be mounted on the framework. They are locally fabricated in Fairfax, Virginia, approximately 15 miles from the jobsite, he reported.

Task timeline

The building’s exterior façade was made with an aluminum composite steel panel rainscreen, Graham reported. Measurements are needed to prefabricate the building’s exterior stud wall panels, featuring customers of the Balfour Beatty project staff an opportunity to make the most of these acknowledged measurements from the stud wall panel drawings to fabricate the metallic panel rainscreen cladding. That cladding is mounted on the prefabricated stud wall panels.

“In addition, the repetitiveness of the project’s home windows and window wall method, which the prefabricated stud wall panels are developed to assist, can make prefabricating the exterior walls a value-productive, efficient, harmless and trustworthy support wall for the project’s window methods,” Graham stated.

Situated close to Amazon’s HQ2 undertaking, Sage at National Landing will be created on the 40,000-square-foot web page of a former Verizon telecommunications developing. It is Balfour Beatty’s 2nd project with LCOR subsequent the company’s the latest completion of LEED-Gold, 20-story multifamily and mixed-use development The Altaire. Developed by Bethesda, Maryland, firm SK+1 Architects, Sage at National Landing is slated for completion in the initial quarter of 2023.